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Biographical details

Julie Leask is an Associate Professor in Sydney Nursing School and Principal Research Fellow in the School of Public Health. She is a visiting Senior Research Fellow at the National Centre for Immunisation Research & Surveillance (NCIRS) where she established the Social Science Unit from 2002.

Julie is a social scientist whose research focuses on vaccination and health risk communication. She has over 90 publications in the field. Julie works with a team of postdoctoral and PhD researchers with a shared focus on improving immunisation policy, programs and practice. She is currently a chief investigator on 3 NHMRC project grants and was previously chief investigator on an NHMRC CRE in Immunisation of Under-Studied and Special Risk Populations and held a Career Development Fellowship, 2012-2017.

Julie has a background in public health, nursing and midwifery with a Master of Public Health (1998) and PhD (2003) from the University of Sydney on "Understanding Immunisation Controversies" where she was also Associate Lecturer in Epidemiology at the Department of Public Health and Community Medicine (1997).

Julie has been invited to advise the Global Vaccine Action Plan, World Health Organization (WHO) Regional Office for Europe, European Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the US President’s Cancer Panel, and the US Institute of Medicine, and the US National Vaccine Program Office. She was an invited visiting Professor at the University of Parma, Italy in 2016. Previously, she was invited by the journal Nature to write an overview of vaccination acceptance in industrialised nations. She currently serves as a member of the WHO Regional Office for EuropeTailoring Immunization Programmes Advisory Group of Experts. She is a founding member of the International Collaboration on Vaccine Acceptance and is co-convenor of the National Collaboration on Social Science in Immunisation.

Research interests

Julie's research interests include immunisation uptake; psychological and sociological aspects of immunisation and infectious diseases, risk communication, primary health care, environmental health and the mass media. She blogs at http://julieleask.wordpress.com and is on twitter as @JulieLeask

International links

(Cardiff University (Paul Kinnersley) )
SARAH - Strategies and Resources to Assist Hesitant parents with vaccination: a collaboration to develop communication pathways in primary care that support parents and providers

(International Collaboration on Vaccine Acceptance)
The International Collaboration on Vaccination Acceptance (ICVA), was established to foster, generate and apply social and behavioral insights and best practices to:
reduce vaccination hesitancy
improve vaccine confidence, and
increase vaccination acceptance and demand.
It includes researchers from multiple countries and is chaired by Dr Bruce Gellin from the Sabin Vaccine Institute.

Monitoring the gap between evidence and vaccination behaviour by sampling the location-specific consumption of health information from news and social media; Dunn A, Leask J; National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC)/Project Grants.

Hooker, L., Capon, A., Leask, J. (2017). Communicating about risk: strategies for situations where public concern is high but the risk is low. Public Health Research and Practice, 27(1), 1-5. [More Information]

Hooker, L., Capon, A., Leask, J. (2017). Communicating about risk: strategies for situations where public concern is high but the risk is low. Public Health Research and Practice, 27(1), 1-5. [More Information]